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Headlines 15 renowned research institute that is an affiliate of WUSM and maintains a vast clinical database on a wide variety of neurodegenerative cases which included common entities such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease to more rare entities like frontotemporal lobar degeneration. This was a ready resource to improve my clinical exposure to these conditions. During this time, I also had exposure to several rare clinical entities. I was able to attend one of the first post-mortems performed in the USA due to a vaping related death. I saw several cases of rare hereditary types of motor neuron disease and other neuromuscular disorders. I was also able to look at study slides from a case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in a young American football player, akin to the rare cases we might encounter in NZ due to trauma subsequent to playing rugby. I also attended teaching sessions run by Dr Alan Pestronk, a prominent neurologist, director of the Neuromuscular Division and the curator of the Neuromuscular Disease Centre website (https:// neuromuscular.wustl.edu ), on muscle and nerve pathology that is used as a reference by practising pathologists. I attended registrar and medical school teaching sessions on neuroradiology, demyelinating disorders, and neuro- oncology for both adult and paediatric cases. My clinical time allowed me to make professional connections for improving research links and clinical work for when I returned home to New Zealand. Research exposure: The integration of clinical work and research endeavours remains a central mission of the Division of Neuropathology and my research projects were conceived in the months prior to me formally starting. I worked in a multidisciplinary team (with other pathologists, radiologists and neuro-oncologists) looking at the differences within the same and different types of brain tumours. I contributed to an ongoing research database and attended post-mortems of cases enrolled in the study. These were children and adults who had brain tumours and were enrolled in the study to donate their brains after death. I took tissue samples from these cases for special pathology and molecular testing and radiological imaging. As part of the study we examined tissue under the microscope and correlated these changes to the radiology findings. This important work creates a future database to be kept in perpetuity and allows ongoing study. I authored a review article on the role of the BRAF gene on central and peripheral nervous system tumours. This is in submission to the journal Frontiers in Oncology for publication. This is especially important in a New Zealand context as medications that can affect these genes are commercially available and have been successfully used in the context of melanoma and lung cancer and certain types of brain cancers. The advancement of molecular medicine I had observed as a trainee has begun to bear clinical fruition. Work life balance: Somewhere amongst all the work, we had the unique experience of living in the USA and experiencing genuine Midwestern hospitality, trying Midwestern barbeque (not to ever be confused with Southern BBQ!), taking the kids out trick-or-treating at Halloween and being invited to a family Thanksgiving meal by colleagues and standing under the St Louis Gateway arch. I feel lucky to have lived and travelled overseas with my family and made some amazing friends along the way. I’m incredibly proud to call New Zealand home and have subsequently returned here and have restarted work as a pathologist at LabPLUS, Auckland City Hospital. I report on a combination of tumour neuropathology and neuromuscular cases. In the future, I hope to be involved in reporting neurodegenerative cases as well as research that has a positive impact in New Zealand “One of the best things about growing up in New Zealand is that if you are prepared to work hard and have faith in yourself, truly anything is possible.” – Peter Jackson “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Dr. Seuss